Today in Raleigh, North Carolina, protesters have raised a ruckus against the actions of the newly-elected school board. Certain members, supported by local Republicans, want to separate schools into racially distinct enclaves of rich and poor by killing a long-standing diversity policy. There have been lawsuits, candlelight vigils, news conferences, and arrests. A month before the rally, NC NAACP President Rev. William Barber was hauled to jail from a sit-in. He's on the steps of the capital today along with church groups and other citizens determined not to roll back the clock on desegregation.
Sounds like a throw-back, right? Until you realize that 4 of the 5 members of the board's controlling bloc are from the North. These northern transplants, it seems, want to do things the way they do them back home. They say they want to give children the advantage of attending neighborhood schools, rather than uphold Wake County's long-standing commitment to ensuring socioeconomic parity through its busing policy. In an ironic reversal, drawling southerners are trying to convince Yankees to be sensitive to the Jim Crow-shadowed past, while white school board members are giving the NAACP lessons on Brown v. Board of Education.
What is going on?
I grew up in Raleigh during the 70s and 80s, and I have lived in New York for most of my adult life. Whenever the subject of race comes up, I get treated to a lot of piousness from my northern friends. They talk a good game (in politely lowered voices) about the need to heal racial wounds and overcome prejudice. But most of these folks went to school at places where people looked and talked just exactly like them. So their attitudes have a certain theoretical quality.
This is how it went down in my town: between kindergarten and high school graduation I attended seven different public schools. I was yanked out of one, plopped into another, bused all over creation, and dumped into classrooms with people whose accents, skin color, and background were radically different from my own. My parents didn't like having me shipped across town into unfamiliar places, any more than the parents of my northern friends would have liked it. But they put up with it because it was the right thing to do. Southern liberals wanted to see the school system integrated so that all the children -- not just their own -- would have a shot at a decent education. There was often hell to pay for this perspective. My father nearly lost his job as a college professor for daring to protest racial injustice in education. But they fought it out, took the heat, and helped their communities come out in a better place. They didn't just talk about the need to sacrifice for their beliefs. They lived it.
On the way to my middle-class subdivision, the elementary school bus I rode stopped at the housing projects where the city's poorest black kids lived. Occasionally there was tension of a very bad kind. My school books were knocked to the ground. Ugly slurs were whispered in my ears. I remember rumors of knives drawn in racial clashes at football games. But I also recall my black friend Tijuana from 5th grade, who showed me how to make elaborate corn-rows in my hair. And I remember going to parties in the housing projects with the high school basketball players, listening to rap music and learning to diffuse tension with a good belly laugh.
Growing up in the desegregation era wasn't easy. But the busing policy tuned me into a broader range of human channels than those available to kids who attended school in bastions of northern white privilege. I find myself more at ease talking about racial issues because I have lived through some of their consequences. I don't, for example, lower my voice when I say the word "black." And I can joke about things that would alarm my northern friends of both races - like the fact that a black southern pal with ancestors of a similar Virginia surname habitually calls me "Cuz." This ease of communication comes from a lifetime of talking, sharing, and listening to people who sat beside me in the classroom and shared my seat on the bus. It's one of the privileges that a torpsy-turvey background in a southern public school system gave me. The black kids from the projects got better schools and better teachers, and I got a sense of belonging to a human family bigger my own small neighborhood.
What the northern transplants on the Wake County school board don't realize is that they will be doing their own children a disservice by narrowing the range of their experience and leaving them awkward and fearful in the presence of those who are different.
Reverend Nancy Petty of Raleigh's Pullen Memorial Baptist Church, who presides over the congregation I belonged to as a child, has stood up in support of today's protest, vowing to "stand together as people of faith and make a statement that we are here for justice."
Stand together, learning together, eating together and laughing together. The Wake Country public school system allowed me to experience these things as I grew up. And I sure wouldn't trade places with anyone denied them.
Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.
I do think the county needs to take a longer-term perspective on the real issue. And that issue is development. Had the county commissioners taken their jobs seriously they would make sure the infrastructure was where the development took place. Right now development seems to take place anywhere and everywhere. And the infrastructure is an after thought. Wake County let's plan how we grow. Let's create a county that is diverse economically throughout the county and get rid of the pockets of poverty/gated communities.
The Supreme Court has held that busing cannot (a) be used to remedy the effects of de facto segregation that have resulted from housing patterns (also known as "white" flight because of the tendency of suburban Caucasian families to leave inner cities - interesting to note that resources left with them) and (b) be used as a levy against all districts when only one district has been subject de jure segregation.
Courts, however, retain their nascent power to continuously examine areas that have once been segregation-prone. Communities are also able to institute diversity policies at their will; this is not outside the power of legislation and can be done even without the presence of past fault. What is obviously here is that the areas in question have muddled pasts and this law is intended to curb that. What is equally important is that the law, on face, doesn't focus only on race (which would make it unconstitutional after Parents v. Seattle in 2007).
What Lynn does here is present a perspective. I realize that there are arguments about diversity, and many of these arguments stand to suggest that the importance now placed on diversity is nothing more than a liberal tool. If one can assume that, however, one should be able to assume that diversity offers something education simply cannot.
The real problem is the inequity in the spending of the education dollars, period! If educational spending was applied more fairly whereas in most cases white schools receive the most dollars in every aspect of dispensing of funds and that is a documented fact. Minority schools are left with whatever crumbs are left. even for the most basic needs such as books and chalk! Sports and other programs are no exception. then the final disparity is in the quality of Administrators and teachers provided for those schools. Desegregation is not the answer! that way is the cowards path or just kicking the can down the road. The bottom line is more money is needed and she be made more accountable is the real solution for all of our kids. If not they will
surely be the future Tea Partiers of this country. Separate and unequal!
Oooh, so your background has made you more at ease speaking about racial issues? Wow, what an immensely valuable life skill.
",,,want to separate schools into racially distinct enclaves of rich and poor by killing a long-standing diversity policy." The policy has been standing for just as long as when the courts decided that you can't bus students around in an absolutely racist fashion, which was the previous policy. The "economic diversity" policy was just window dressing and a name change to game the system back to the previous racist policy.
Show me the data that statistically demonstrates the diversity policy's race-equitable, quantifiable benefit to all groups of students, bused and unbused, and I'll support it.
You can't do that though, as is doesn't benefit ANY economic group of students, and very few individual students, and harms more than it helps.
Not Republican. At all.
Not supporting the bussing policy - at all.
Overall, I agree with Derrick.
1) WCPSS has failed to meet the under-40% FRL policy in 30% of their schools. This part of the socioeconomic diversity plan failed. (see the wcpss website).
2) They expected their plan to work - 95% at or above grade level by 2008. This outcome failed.
3) If you review the research, family support is THE deciding factor in student success. When my child is mandated to attend a school 45 minutes away, I cannot offer the support I want for their games, plays, recitals, etc. & our other son goes to school in another town. I work. My husband works. We want to be involved. But this policy makes it so we cannot be as involved as we want to. And parental involvement matters most for their success.
4) Magnet schools can offer diversity to un-diverse schools. They've had much more success than this plan.
5) I am tired of my son getting on a bus at 630am when school doesn't even start until 830am. A waste of his time, a waste of money (gas, bus-driver, etc).
I encourage people not to read thought and opinion articles. Read studies, actual effects/outcomes, quantitative results. One or two studies is not enough... what does the body of research say as a whole (specific to this plan)? What is really the best way for my child to learn?
Your argument about results not being achieved is correct, but I don't agree that the Margiotta/Tedesco plan is the right one. My research shows that similar sized school districts that use that approach have worse results than does Wake. So rather than throw the baby out with the bath water, maybe we could attack the parts that are not working, rather than a replacement of the entire system.
There is no danger in Wake of state takeover of school systems as happened in Newark, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore. The main cause of these problems was white flight, which didn't happen here because Raleigh allowed their schools to merge with Wake County. Had they not done so, rest assured Raleigh would look much like Newark.
No system is perfect, and I certainly don't have the answers that will solve all the district's issues. I do know that my children are better off dealing with others from all walks of life at an early age rather than having to do it later. It will serve them well in 21st Century America.